Climbing the Beanstalk March 16, 2005

Welcome to the March 16, 2005 edition of “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the bi-weekly newsletter on search engines and search engine positioning from Beanstalk. The formatting of the newsletter is changing with this edition. We have had many requests to sources, resources, and places to find additional information on the points noted on our site and in previous newsletters. You will find that this edition of the newsletter and all subsequent versions will contain much more of this information.

And Now … The news:

The Top Three …

Google News – Results on Google are changing periodically and backlink counts that changed a couple weeks ago now appear to be back to the post-change numbers. This traditionally inmplies that a backlink update, PageRank update, or algorithm update are forthcoming. The timing is right for a backlink update and algorithm update. If a PageRank update took place it would be earlier than expected but only by a few weeks.

Word in the trenches is that we may be in for a real treat (or SEO nightmare) from Google with changes in all three areas coming at the end of this month or early next.

MSN News – MSN has gone through a number of tweaks since the launch of their new engine. There appear to be two main criteria for ranking well on this engine. Link popularity appears to be playing a bigger role on MSN than on either of the other main engines. Additionally, clean code that conforms to W3C compliance appears to give sites a “one up” on MSN. It doesn’t appear to be the make-or-break at this point but it does give an added bonus as more W3 compliant sites are showing up in the top 3 than on the other engines.

Are we the only ones that find it ironic that a Microsoft property would give a bit of a boost to W3C compliant sites when their own browser (Internet Explorer) is the very one that supports the widest variety of non-W3C compliant web practices.

Yahoo! – By far the slowest of the engines in their current updating practices. Their crawler is around less and the frequency with which their cache updates is far lower than either Google or MSN. there have been no major changes to the Yahoo! algorithm since the last newsletter.

The quest for higher search engine positioning on the natural search engines is generally the quest to increase revenue from a product or service. It is not the rankings themselves that hold any special value; it is the visitors that they bring and the resulting increase in business. It is for this reason that the PPC engines and namely the secondary ones are a great tool in developing a campaign strategy for the natural engines that will produce the highest return on investment … <more>

Useful Tools

We highly recommend checking our these great SEO tools. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer they will save you countless hours and headaches:

We’re always surfing and always on the lookout for useful information on top of the testing and analyzing we do on our own. Below you will find links to some of the more useful information we have found recently including forum posts and articles.

It has often been said that the heart of a search marketing campaign rests on the success of your keyword research and the use of the results thereof. Sure, slotting in a word or two for the sake of deceiving a search engine is one way of getting the job done, but in all honesty this is something that is best left for amateurs …

Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct purpose of costing the advertiser money. It’s similar to paying out cash for false leads. According to InternetWeek.com, 60% of those who responded to a survey conducted by the “Search Engine Professional Organization” had stated that fraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising …

When to Hire a Professional SEO Firm? – Article by Corey Wenger (on Lil’Engine)

Note: link removed as the page no longer exists.

Conduct your SEO program in-house or out-source it. To answer this question, let’s first take a look at the knowledge, skills and resources necessary to implement and maintain a successful search engine optimization program …

Buried within the help files of the site, there are several wonderful clues to assist web site owners, web site marketing and promotion firms and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals in gaining visibility within MSN search, for themselves or for their clients …

Thank You

Thank you very much for subscribing to “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the bi-weekly search engine positioning newsletter. If you have any questions about the areas covered or if there are any areas of search engine positioning that you would like to see covered in future articles/newsletter please don’t hesitate to contact us. We want to write what you want to know.